A number of large-scale science and commercial applications produce large amounts of data, on the order of terabytes to petabytes, that must be transported across wide-area networks. For example, large simulation data sets produced by science application, such as eScience application on supercomputers, may be archived at a remote storage site, or bank transaction records or inventories of large department stores may be synchronized with remote storage during off-peak hours.
When data providers and consumers are geographically distributed, dedicated connections are needed to effectively support a variety of remote tasks including data mining, data consolidation and alignment, storage, visualization and analysis. The dedicated bandwidth channels offer large capacity for massive data transfer operations and dynamically stable bandwidth for monitoring and steering operations. It is important that these channels be available when the data is or will be ready to be transferred at a particular time. Thus, the ability to reserve such dedicated bandwidth channels either on-demand or in-advance is critical to both data transfer operations.